Jonathan Kozol, a Harvard-educated public school teacher who has written several seminal books about the plight of children in low-income urban schools and neighborhoods, will speak at 7 tonight in Schwab Auditorium.

"This is not a speech that is going to be impenetrable. This is a guy who really has something to say to young people about the state of their nation," said Henry Giroux, Waterbury Chair Professor of Education at Penn State. "He's a public intellectual. . . . His writings on race, poverty, education and youth serve as a testimonial to what it means to act with courage and conviction."

Kozol, author of Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation and Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, plans to speak on "The Persistence of Apartheid Education: Still Separate, Still Unequal in America."

Many of his non-fiction books mix research data and media reports with personal accounts of children, families and teachers he has met in travels around Roxbury, Mass., the South Bronx, N.Y., and East St. Louis, Mo.